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Wooded Village

I did this map recently just for the hell of it, to try out some new ideas with the village base and have a play with some pen & ink style again after being inspired from this thread from palehorse (not that this art is comparable to his...)

It doesn't even have a name. Sorta generic village in the woods kinda thing that might be useful to a GM at some point.

The village stands on a clearing that was used as an over night camp in a large wood that took several days to traverse. The dolmen and the pool are ancient and provided shelter for generations. With ever increasing traffic permanent structures appeared and now a small village prospers on the passing trade. Its likely that carpentry, farriers and alike make up the miscellaneous trades with the inn and overnight accommodation being the mainstay.

Interesting. I must admit I do not like the mix of realistic trees and sketched buildings/etc.--too discordant, I think, and also breaking what I think you were attempting with this map, right? Hmm--on second thought perhaps I'm just not sure I'm gathering what exactly you were trying to do here(?)

I would say that I also do not necessarily like this discordant style either but its a pragmatic approach. The trouble is that you would need hundreds of top down photos of medieval buildings to make up all of the nice alleyways that jigsaw together. I certainly don't have that and I have never seen anyone that does though I have seen much closer than this. So that would mean that there would never be a possible approach to making a realistic map for medieval settings that included buildings. I'm prepared to compromise to have it.

The long and short of it was that I was ill in bed and away from the PC so got out my pen and pad.

The bit I was trying new stuff on is the base. The green and mud sections of the paths. I was using a new method and trying to pen in places that people might walk or use and make that mud then get the PC to automatically texture that based on my masks. I was pretty pleased with the results of that. It takes more memory to hold the bitmap base instead of using splat icons but it is easier and gives a smoother, less regular and more pleasing result. I think that for these kinds of villages I will make this my de-facto standard until I find a better way.

Just to be clear, the trees, the ploughed/plowed areas and the pond are icon splats but the green and mud bits are bitmapped texture.

I wonder if you couldn't make some fairly basic 3d models of medieval buildings and render them in overhead iso with your favorite 3d engine. The trees aren't altogether photorealistic so this could work. Especially if you had some photographic textures of roofing(try wood shingles, thatching or perhaps terra cotta for a wealthy Mediterranean urban look).

Hi Su_Liam, I think that your suggestion is a great one but it would be a lot of work. I tried to make a house construction set. A group of splat icons where they would all fit together in various ways to make one house. Then rearrange to make another etc. I did this reasonably successfully to make these tiled houses... (HousesTiled1)

I really wanted to do this for thatch tho but I found it harder and gave up quickly - maybe I should have spent more effort on it and done it properly. Anyway, I kept making lots of full cottages instead, some of which are in the images in that link for such set ups as Mill1 etc.

In case anyone would like to make some 3D models I am including here some of my photos of thatch. There are a still a lot of thatch cottages in the UK but getting close to many of them and especially getting a close photo perpendicular to the thatch has been a problem.

Muse... I wonder if its possible to get pics of real modern houses and get an app to replace the roof with thatch patterns. That could generate a lot of buildings quickly. Hmmmm...

That clears up what I was confused about, Redrobes. I also realized I should have said that I liked the buildings, and think they are wonderfully authentic and rich--which is what made the trees stand out to me: I wanted the trees to match the buildings' great sketch style, not the buildings to be photorealistic. (I like hand-drawn much more than most other styles).

That being said, I would also love for someone to do the rendering of the thatched roofs and such. I plan on thefting heavily from you all! Mwahahahaha!!! --oh, ahem, did I bellow that out loud?...

Ah I got the wrong end of the stick there. I like pen style too just that my particular houses were not all that great. My main quest tho is to try to get a photo real looking terrain like a satellite image on a medieval / fantasy terrain.

and yes, both trees and houses are the worst of the images to get. You can rip google and copyright stuff but I would like known PD stuff like views from a hot air balloon or maybe even bonsai trees etc. My best has been leaning over cliffs and tall buildings. Not the best sources so far.

Houses too are hard to come by. I know I should get off my butt and make some proper ones in 3D but I am taking all my time doing the terrain stuff at present. It would be a major boost to have some nice libre 3D houses for doing old cities.

If anyone knows of photo sources that can fill in either of these things then I am all ears.

I keep reading about Kite Photography. People strap large kites to a suspended (CHEAP) camera and set up a remote control or timer to take the photos. You can get photos pointed directly down for a perfect top down view of any area you can get a kite over, powerlines and trees compose the major threats.

I've also read about using a digital camera and a GPS tagger on weather balloons, but I don't think I need photos quite that high.

Make magazine has articles on both methods if you want to look them up for more info.

Oh yeah baby ! I have heard about this when reading on Debevecs web site (http://www.debevec.org/Campanile/) - go there, thats one COOOL site - where the guy took some shots for the campanile movie.

I have thought about it but I haven't flown a kite since a time just after I got to grips with this crawling / walking thing. I always thought it might be a fun way to trash a few digicams. But they are getting a lot cheaper recently where a 2+ MPix is about £20 ($40 or so) - prob less if you could keep getting second hand ones. The remote shutter would be no problem. Its the kite I worry about.